AWS Game Day
On a AWS Game Day your engineering teams will participate in a competition implementing into AWS. Let's see how you can organize this for your company and what you can expect from it
The AWS Game Day claims to be
[..] A collaborative learning exercise that tests skills in implementing AWS solutions to solve real-world problems in a gamified, risk-free environment. This is a completely hands-on opportunity for technical professionals to explore AWS services, architecture patterns, best practices, and group cooperation. […]
In today’s issue, I will cover how you can organize this event for your tech company, how the whole event is managed, and what were my lessons learned when I participated.
How to organize an AWS Game Day
In case your company already works with AWS (your company uses AWS technologies, so you pay to AWS), the organization for the AWS Game Day it’s quite simple.
The AWS folks organize everything about infrastructure for the Game Day, based on the type of Game Day you agreed with them. Usually, based on the technologies you are using in your company, they tune up the game accordingly. There are several types of AWS Game Day.
You just put the office and the computers to be used by the engineers that will participate in the AWS Game Day,
I didn’t experience organizing this on a company that is not working with AWS already, so I cannot describe how the organization of the event could be triggered in that case.
The big challenge that you will face, before starting the organization, is about convincing your management line for investing time in an AWS Game Day. My advice here is that you talk to AWS folks for them to provide you with metrics about the positive impact that this Game Day had in other companies like yours, and the feedback they got from those events in other companies. You could use that to convince your management.
As the organizer of this event for your company, one of the main challenges you will face is having your engineers participate in the event. This means that you have to find the right moment for them.
You will have to record who will participate and later organize the teams that will participate. You could have to ping several times engineers to fulling some Excel file or something, so you have clarity about who will attend.
Another important part of the organization is the team’s creation. It’s important that, during the inscription phase, your engineers indicate their roles and their technical skills. This is important because you should create the teams to have balanced teams. Having a team full of AWS experts will not be fun but, having an SRE plus some software developers per team would make the event much more challenging and fun.
Ensure that the information, about the distribution of the teams, reaches all the participants.
The whole event is organized in 2 days.
First day. It’s kind of an intro to the AWS ecosystem and some parts that are relevant, based on the type of technologies you agreed before with AWS
Game Day!
First day
It will be a 3 hours Zoom-alike call, driven by AWS engineers, which your engineers are encouraged to attend. It’s true that engineers with experience on AWS, may not need to attend this first day.
In this session, people from AWS will use some slides to introduce the AWS ecosystem. Also, your engineers will have some hands-on work to do. AWS people will share a link to an AWS lab which will be used by your engineers to mimic what AWS people will do live.
The part of working with the lab is the most interesting to me. During this time, AWS people explain how to create AWS Lambdas and how to use them in the AWS State Machine, which is a low-code alike tool on which you can create workflows with lambdas and different inputs/outputs, like SNS, S3, etc.
The last part of this first day is dedicated to some AWS stuff. When I participated, it was about what is called the AWS “Well-architected Framework”. AWS people mentioned that this can be used for the following use cases:
Learning best practices for the cloud
Technology governance
Portfolio management
I will give you my opinion on this. I was not able to see the value of this “Well-Architected Framework“. I would love to see a real use case on which this is used. Every time I see concepts like this, I always remember this Recommended architecture for WordPress…
So, let’s be careful and not use a tool that could overcomplicate our job and our budget.
Game Day!
All right! It’s game day! The day starts with the AWS folks doing an introduction to the game. During this day, you will have AWS folks in the site of your office to provide support to your teams during the game.
I would advise putting together, ideally in an open space, all teams around, to encourage healthy competition, jokes, and fun. If you can have a screen, easily visible to the team members, with the scoreboard, you will see that the intensity of the game improves.
The AWS organizers will send an email to all participants with clear instructions for login into the system that will be used during the game.
The game begins and the participants can start to solve the tasks and investigate how to improve a “unicorn-based system”. I don’t want to say much more, so this issue is spoiler-free. What I can tell is the teams will have to use the AWS console to manage some configurations to get more points. A bit of coding skills will be needed too. The team that gets more points, as usual, wins.
After the 3 hours this event takes all teams will have to meet back again with the AWS organizers to deliver the prizes to the winners.
Final thoughts
I have to say I had so much fun when I participate. The organization from AWS folks was great, and the help provided by the AWS people on site was really useful when you could get blocked.
Also, the feedback I got from all participants is that they learned something new during the event. Also, the participants shared with me that they were able to explore more the AWS ecosystem, because you had to do so during the game, and learn how to configure certain things in AWS. Finally, the majority of the people manifested their willingness to participate in an AWS Game Day in the future.
This is a recommended event to bring to your company, bringing some good vibes to your teams and some learnings too.
If you organize an AWS Game Day in your company, I would love to hear from you and read your comments about how was your experience.